The first generally available recordings of the music of Eyvind Alnæs
came with Kirsten Flagstad’s performances of four of his songs with
orchestra. These were made during her Indian summer in the studio with
Decca
during the 1950s. It is only recently that we have been given the opportunity
to hear more of his works, including a splendidly full-blooded Piano
Concerto recorded by Piers Lane for Hyperion
as part of their series of ‘romantic piano concertos’. The two symphonies
which I have not heard were given a warm welcome by Rob Barnett in his
review
for this site. However an earlier recording of Alnæs songs by Bodil
Arnesen and Erling Ragnar Eriksen (again) appears to have succumbed
to the deletions axe, so this disc (which duplicates some of the items
on that issue) is currently the only CD to offer a conspectus of Alnæs’s
songs. Unlike that previous release, this issue contains some complete
sets of songs rather than individual items selected from them including
many first recordings.

Not that Alnæs’ complete sets of songs seem to have much internal unity,
as is witnessed by the somewhat unlikely pairing of Robert Burns and
Heinrich Heine in the Op.6 volume – they seem to have been more a matter
of convenience for the purposes of publication. They do however confirm
Alnæs as one of the more prominent successors of Grieg in the field
of Norwegian music, who has been unfairly neglected. His concentration
in the medium of songs with piano may raise some parallels with Gerald
Finzi in England, although Finzi’s concentration on the lyrics of one
poet – Thomas Hardy – gives his song cycles a unity to which Alnæs cannot
and does not aspire.

There are some real masterpieces here, including a setting of Burns’s
The last Psalm, Op.6/5 (track 13, in German translation) which
must be among the best treatments of the Scottish bard ever written.
Comprehensive notes by Audun Jonassen give us plenty of biographical
detail as well as detailed observations on the songs; but the producers
have missed a trick by not giving us the songs in the order of composition,
so that the listener can hear the development in Alnæs’s style to which
Jonassen draws our attention.

There is another drawback to this re-ordering of the songs, which is
that in the Op.34 settings which open the disc Ann-Beth Solvang sounds
distinctly small-voiced, and given that she has sung – and recorded
– Wagner this suggests that she is adopting a deliberately intimate
tone. Later she gives us her full voice and makes the Op.6 settings
into a real highlight, but the hint almost of a soubrette does
get the disc off to a rather unfortunate start. She is not helped, either,
by a rather closely observed recording acoustic which gives the impression
of an airless studio which also robs the piano of resonance. One is
surprised to note that the recordings were made in a concert hall, which
leads one to suspect too close a placing of the microphones. A greater
sense of atmosphere around the sound would have been welcome.

Alnæs himself was an acclaimed accompanist - that and his conducting
duties restricted his compositional activities - and his piano parts
are often surprisingly elaborate. None of this fazes Erling Ragnar Eriksen,
who clearly enjoys the splashy handfuls of chords that end many of these
songs as well as the filigree harp-like chords in En Vaggvislåt,
Op. 41/3 (track 26). Again a greater distance from the microphone might
have lent the sound of the instrument more atmosphere. I tried using
a graphic equaliser and found that this artificial enhancement helped
matters to some extent. The very short Folcke setting En Vår,
Op.41/4 (track 27) then brought the recital to a most satisfactory conclusion.

The booklet includes full texts (in Norwegian, Swedish and German) and
notes in Norwegian and English. A delightful footnote tells us “The
English translations prepared for this booklet do not aim to reflect
the poetic qualities of the originals, as will soon be evident; they
attempt solely to reflect the meaning. By the same token, some of the
originals hardly make more sense than the translations.” Well, by that
same token there does not appear to be an abundance of superlative poetry
here, but then whoever said that great poetry was required to produce
a great song? There really are some very good songs in this collection.

Comparisons with the now-deleted collection of Alnæs songs by Bodil
Arnesen hardly seems relevant, but for the record I note here that only
two of the songs here are duplicated in that recital: Op.22/3 and Op.26/1.
Those who have invested in the earlier release can therefore confidently
investigate this new one without fear of much duplication; and in fact
Arnesen includes the two songs from Op.30 which are omitted by Solvang.